The Religious and the Mystical

Originally Posted Sunday, June 9, 2013

Sunday nights anywhere have a big hollow feeling about them, but it is magnified when you are alone on the road and the town empties out.  I am the only guest at the Palacio de Marquesa tonight.  I brought home food from the grocery store and ate out on the patio as the sun went fire red at setting.  Chicken, garlic olives, red pepper hummus, a hard roll, roasted garlic, stuffed grape leaves, and a bottle of wine.  Every sound magnified, the crying of the birds, the distant siren, the howling of the dogs. 

It was hot today, brutally so for me, so dry without clouds.  At 7,000 feet, the U.V. rays are trouble.  I stopped at a ski shop and bought some sunglasses as my eyes were burned by the sun the day before.  This morning's coolness is a memory.  The day's heat lingers on. 

I thought of many ways to start this post or a hundred posts.  There is so much to say, so many ways to say it.  This is Cormac McCarthy country.  It is hard, but where ain't?  High altitude cowboys or shrimpers working boats out of Key West.  New England fishermen or Canadian lumberjacks.  Wherever people must live with the elements, things can be difficult. 

I ate breakfast with a rancher this morning.  New Mexico has been without rain for years.  His cows have no grass to graze, so he has to drop feed.  Usually, he said, he can get enough in the summer to feed them all year, but this year he has to buy hay and grain.  He has reduced his herd by two-thirds.  But beef prices are going to go up, he said, and he will make more money off the cows he has.  That is the hope for him, at least.  It is just life for him, he said.  There are good years and there are bad.  He waits for rain.  One thing you believe in out here, he told me, is God.  I don't know, though, if I could. 

There was much religion today at Taos Pueblos.  Indian culture.  The religion here is patriarchal and patrilinear.  The woman telling me this grew up in the Pueblo and went to college to be a creative writer.  Now she leads tours.  She is not allowed to explain her religion, she said.  It is forbidden.  It is not written.  The sacred word is passed down from holy father to holy father.  I bit my tongue.  What do I know about living with hardship and the need to believe?  Still. . . .

 
It must have been a good life in the past.  Now it just looks. . . beat.  The pueblos now have windows and doors.  These are new additions.  Traditionally the house was entered from the roof.  Lots of warfare.  Maybe, then, it wasn't so good at all.  The people now have added conveniences like running water and cooking gas.  There are thousands of trucks and cars.  They pretend to live a traditional life in the Pueblo, but it is nothing like that now. 

I made the obligatory trip into the cathedral.  I didn't hear the talk on this one, so I will have to look it up later.  I am not so curious, though.  The main church was destroyed a long time ago by soldiers and canons.  It remains in ruins but for the bell tower.  It is a graveyard now where only certain people may be buried.  The guide could not talk about the selection process for that, either.  Many secrets here.  I could have told her, though.  It is no different than any other group that is privileged.  But what's the use in saying so? 

The sun finally beat me into submission.  I had had enough of ancient stories and surly natives.  I stood on tourist ground.  Everything I would ever want to know was hidden. 

I drove to another cathedral, the San Franciso de Asis Mission Churh.   This is the one famously painted by Georgia O'Keeffe.  It is barely off a highway and you could fly by it and never know it was there.  It is a single building in a square of nothing shops and a restaurant where I decided to have lunch.  It was Mexican and ordinary.  It was now going on two o'clock and the sun was far too hot.  It was time to go back to the room, close the blinds, take off all my clothes, and take a long, delicious nap. 

I managed to leave my room around five.  I decided to take a drive and just get lost.  It is not easy to get lost, really, as all roads seem to lead to the same place.  So I drove around slowly up into the foothills of Taos where there suddenly was grass and trees and shade.  New Mexico apparently has few laws about what you can build and where, but I came upon some nice homes on larger lots and pieces of property and realized that not all of Taos was beat to shit houses and trailer parks.  No, there is some money up in the hills. 

After an hour or so, I came out south of town on the main highway leading into it.  And there on the outskirts behind a Walmart in a lot connected to a salvage yard sat some sort of carnival.  I was tired, but I had to take a look.  The way there was not obvious, and I had to drive down numerous dirt roads before I snaked through the salvage lot and came out into the empty field.  It was spooky, almost as if it were closed.  But there were carnies, of a sort, and the rides were lit up and sometimes moving.  But there was not a single customer.  Not one.  I walked through with my camera under the heavy stares of big Mexican men with mirror sunglasses.  There were enough of them.  I wanted to ask questions, wanted to get the "inside scoop," but I was not the man for it.  Not this day.  And so after my one brave tour around the park, I made my way back to my car, the thing still a mystery.  If I did not have the photographs, I would not believe it was real. 

These are notes, simply a way of getting things down and remembering.  If I don't write it, I will surely forget.  And still, there is so much more to tell.  There are the trailer parks and the tough boys and Mexican-Indian girls in tight jeans and the cowboys with cowboy muscles and the dust and the heat and the others, all those who are part of the Taos you want to visit.  I will tell that later, I hope.  I will tell you about sitting at KTAO and drinking wine and looking across the plains into the distant mountains.  But I am done for now.  I have showered for the first time in two days (the desert doesn't make you dirty) and am full of wine and now whiskey and am ready to let my mind wander.  I will lie in bed and watch Mad Men (I know, I know), and then get up in the morning and drive to Santa Fe for my workshop.  I will be with people for the first time in days.  We'll see just how that goes.